Why Is Print Considered an Especially Trustworthy Marketing Method?

When you are formulating a new marketing campaign for your company, most of your thoughts are probably on digital marketing rather than more traditional, print-based methods. This is understandable, as the former offers a low-cost means of targeting potential customers.

Unfortunately, though, many of your competitors have likely reached the same conclusion – and the oversaturation of digital marketing has, over time, somewhat blunted its effectiveness. Anyone can easily use such marketing, even unscrupulous people – perhaps leading its perceived value to fall.

On the subject of direct mail, that certainly gets noticed. 79% of households have reported reading or scanning direct mail ads, while 39% of customers reveal that they sample a company for the first time due to such advertising. After receiving direct mail, 44% of customers visit a brand’s website.

The measurable effect on ROI is undeniable. Judging from figures posted by the Data & Marketing Association, 4.6% of all direct email elicits a response, whereas the corresponding response rate with email is a mere 0.12%. Hence, of 100,000 recipients of direct mail, 4,600 are likely to buy.

Why Is Print Marketing so Strongly Trusted?

These findings about direct mail could prompt you to invest heavily in business cards, booklets, and similar items for sending out to consumers. You could even print out these promotional supplies in-house with a printing machine bought from Duplo International.

However, you don’t even always have to go as far as printing out your own marketing materials to make good use of print advertising. You could resort to instead inserting ads into print newspapers and magazines, as such ads are considered highly trustworthy in themselves.

In a press release on the PR Newswire website, the research institute MarketingSherpa reported what it found from surveying 2,400 US consumers. The survey asked recipients to sort advertising channels into “trustworthy” and “untrustworthy” categories – and the findings were eye-opening.

The findings included that 82% of Americans trust print ads in newspapers and magazines, while just a quarter of Americans trusted online pop-ups.

Daniel Burstein, Senior Director of Editorial Content at MarketingSherpa, commented: “There’s a very high-value online content – even most print publications publish online as well – but that real value is drowning in a sea of mediocrity or worse, and as a whole, it damages consumers’ trust.”

Print Marketing Can Help You to Cut Through the Noise

Perhaps another reason why print tends to earn more trust than digital marketing does is that the former is more tangible and, therefore, attracts attention more easily. It’s hard to simply ignore something that is already in your hand, whereas an email can be gone with just a simple tap of a “delete” button. Print publicity can create a more enduring emotional response.